yummy rice cakes

Every year, I usually try to schedule a vacation and go home to be with my family in Boston during the Lunar New Year. When I was working, it was easy to take a few personal days off and just fly home. But then I started this thing called law school and it interfered with taking personal days off. Last year, fortunately, the lunar new year fell on the weekend of Presidents Day, so we had a Monday off from school and I was able to skip Friday classes and spend four days with my family celebrating Tet (Vietnamese New Year).
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By being home for the "holiday," I was able to parttake in the traditional festivities like watching the parade/shows, eating, silly dice game of bau cua ca cop, eating, collecting red envelopes, and more eating.
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This year, however, I couldn't go home because I couldn't afford to skip 10 classes. And because I'm in the middle of no good asian food land, I wouldn't be able to eat all the good desserts, like rice cakes. So I called my mom and asked her if it was even possible to send me some. Fed-ex overnight is a good thing. She sent me a variety of rice cakes and I quickly gobbled down two of the small rolls.

Above, is a version of rice cakes called Banh Chung. If you want to see how it's made, click here for a musical video.

This was the pile of rice cakes that my mom sent to me (love you mommy!)

And here is the unwrapped rice cake. I'm preparing to eat it.

But first I like to heat it up by frying it for a few minutes.

And then I stuffed everything in my mouth. It was so good. I love the sticky rice, and this version was especially yummy because it was just green bean filling and didn't have the fatty meat in it (which is also good too).